119Copyright © 2011 Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU) Press Technika

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tgac20

GEODESY AND CARTOGRAPHYISSN 2029-6991 print / ISSN 2029-7009 online

2011 Volume 37(3): 119–124

doi:10.3846/13921541.2011.626257

UDK 528.9

THE ATLAS OF NORTHEASTERN YIDDISH: ON THE STATUSOF MAPS IN LINGUISTIC RESEARCH

Giedrė Beconytė1, Dovid Katz2

1Vilnius University, M. K. Čiurlionio g. 21/27, LT-03101 Vilnius, Lithuania 2Litvak Studies Institute, Pylimo g. 4, LT-01117 Vilnius, Lithuania E-mails:

1giedre.beconyte@gf.vu.lt (corresponding author); 2dovidkatz7@yahoo.com

Received 10 August 2011; accepted 07 September 2011

Abstract. The paper introduces the application of cartographic methods to research on a culture at the last

moment of its in situ existence. The atlas in progress seeks to determine the historic external borders, the internal

differentiation and the cultural and linguistic structure and characteristics of Líte ([lítә] – the territory of

traditional Jewish Lithuania (coterritorial with today’s Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and swaths of northeastern

Poland, northern and eastern Ukraine and westernmost Russia). The main linguistic data were initially

organized by lists of locations where use of a particular form had been documented. Sparse information has

been converted to a relational database model, linked to geographic data (locations) and analyzed. The discovered

information was sufficient to approximately locate spatial clusters that were not thought to be recoverable when

the project was initiated. The results of the geographic analysis are presented in the form of maps in the evolving

draft of Litvish: An Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish that is accessible for preview at http://www.dovidkatz.net/

WebAtlas/AtlasSamples.htm. The structure of the linguistic database also enables publication of the data as a web

service representing the location of occurrences of linguistic forms on a larger scale map. However, the small scale

linguistic maps represent characteristics of the dialect areas that are more convenient for readers who specialize in

the relevant language and culture, but are not familiar with geospatial technologies.

Keywords: cartography, linguistic research, linguistic maps, dialects, dialectology, Yiddish atlas, Lithuania, Litvak.

1. Background

This project, the language atlas Litvish: An Atlas of North-eastern Yiddish was not conceived de novo. It was con-ceptualized on the basis of a century’s work in Yiddish dialectology that had started with the non-Lithuanian (“southern”) Yiddish dialects of Eastern Europe, in the works of Landau (1896) and Prilutski (1920 etc.), and came to encompass the North (“the Lithuanian area”) in the Soviet Yiddish atlas of Vilenkin and Veynger (1931), and then, in the postwar (and still ongoing) Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (Herzog et al. 1992 etc.). The current project was born of frustration with the methodological and linguistic limitations of working ex-clusively with emigré informants (e.g. in North America or Israel), which had been the only kind of taped dialec-tological research possible during the Cold War and So-viet times. Nevertheless, Jean Jofen (1953) had demon-strated the plausibility of atlas construction with emigré informants, and Uriel Weinreich had constructed a bril-liant blueprint for a major Yiddish language atlas in North America (see e.g. U. Weinreich 1960) which evolved into the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry.

With the collapse of the USSR, possibilities opened

up for a project to find and systematically interview

such informants as could still be found in situ, though

it was known from the start that in view of the Holo-

caust and the minimal remnant nature of survivors on

the territory that had been occupied by the Third Reich,

there could be no systematic geographic coverage (e.g.

to obtain evenly distributed data from all or equidistant

points on a grid). Still, for the practice of dialectology,

the emergence of classic patterns of linguistic differentia-

tion, clustering and patterned geolinguistic gradation are

firm signs of accurate retrieval of data even from such

scattered “mohican” informants. Moreover, the discov-

ery and documentation of survivors in their eighties or

nineties, some of whom were the last speakers of Yid-

dish in their towns or regions, represented an eleventh

hour opportunity not only for Yiddish dialectology, but

a project of potentially wider methodological interest for

determining recoverability of the geolinguistic makeup

of vanished societies.

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120 G. Beconytė, D. Katz. Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish: importance of maps in linguistic research

Various aspects of East European Yiddish elucidat-ed by this project have led to a series of maps and analy-ses published by both named authors, especially in Katz (2007, 2010).

2. Spatial aspect of the research

The project was limited from the start to what has been known for centuries as Litvish or “Lithuanian Yiddish” and which covers a substantial territory broadly remi-niscent of various incarnations of the erstwhile Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Katz 2010: 19). Much of the heart-land of the territory is in today’s Belarus, and for much of the 1990s, the second named author carried out one or two expeditions a year to Belarus, each time covering another section of the country and eventually crossing borders to pursue the dialect to its contemporary lim-its, for example to Brest in the southwest, discovered to be a mixed dialect, with many aspects characteristic of the southerly Ukrainian (Southeastern) Yiddish; but, ex-tending all the way to Kherson, on the Black Sea, in the southeast, where the current Belarus-Ukraine border has no significance for the historical patterning of the Yid-dish language. He settled in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1999 to pursue the project more systematically and intensive-ly. In other words, expeditions over a twenty year peri-od tended to follow the data, either in the sense of (a) pursuing informants as far as they existed (for example very few were found in today’s eastern Poland, and hopes for e.g. Białystok, within Litvish, could not be pursued in situ, while a single outstanding in Suwałki / Suvalk led to returns there); pursuing informants until a major dialect boundary had been crossed to obtain as much data as possible about the place of the boundary (in some cases more exactly than previous research had established) and about the precise structural composition of transitional dialects (e.g. in parts of northern and eastern Ukraine).

Analysis of spatial information can be performed through interactive visual interfaces. Geographic infor-mation systems provide convenient tools for confirma-tory analysis that includes calculation of statistics and measurements. However, dealing with sparse and in-consistent data, it cannot be considered a very efficient method and the intuitively acceptable answers may be not statistically significant. Moreover, even when GIS systems and tools of spatial analysis can provide answers to many particular questions, the task of formulating such questions remains challenging.

Using images of maps for the exploratory analysis is a better approach in this instance. Maps have a hidden potential to reveal unknown spatial patterns and trends and the process does not require any specific technologi-cal skills on the part of the user, who may be well versed in the target language and in traditional dialectology. They allow for integration of expert and common knowl-edge to the end of discovering cross-thematic spatial pat-terns (Beconytė, Kryžanauskas 2010: 606). The authors have decided to use the results of spatial statistic analysis as background information on maps that also represent, of course, the data itself. A series of maps have been de-signed in order to facilitate visual analysis of distribution of dialects within the dialect and cultural boundaries of Jewish Lithuania (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Dialect and cultural borders

of Jewish Lithuania

3. Technology

A general conceptual model of the database is shown in Fig. 2.

The words have the semantic attributes of their English language counterparts. The same word may have many Yiddish forms that occur in different locations. The forms are linked to each other in different and rath-er complex ways thus forming various groups and sub-groups within one dialect. Such a model is very flexible; however some specific information could only be stored in the form of textual notes.

Spatial statistical techniques have been used for measuring spatial autocorrelation, analyzing spatial pat-terns (i.e., clustering or dispersion), and assessing distri-butions of spatial data. Spatial statistics differ from tradi-tional statistics in that space and spatial relationships are an integral and implicit component of analysis (therefore some traditional statistical tools are not suitable for spa-tial data analysis). ArcGIS 9 Spatial statistics tools were used to:

a) evaluate whether features or attribute values form a clustered, uniform, or random pattern across a region (Average Nearest Neighbor Distance, High/Low Concentration, and Spatial Autocorre-lation tools);

b) determine the characteristics of the distribution, such as location of the center, the shape and orien-tation of the data, and the degree to which objects are dispersed. Unfortunately, initial data was

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Geodesy and Cartography, 2011, 37(3): 119–124 121

not sufficient to produce statistically significant results. However, general trends were lucidly re-vealed and used to confirm or correct the lin-guistic borders of items. In cases where individu-al isoglosses are pivotal to both native speakers’ and scholars’ very definitions of different dialects and their concomitant cultural correlates, such “details” become significant for the whole.

Most hypotheses can be verified using spatial anal-ysis that is formulated only after initial visualization of data (mapping) that once again demonstrates the power of visual perception and the exploitation of spatial data. In order to facilitate understanding and primary visual analysis, much attention has been paid to the design of the conventional signs that represent complex links be-tween the linguistic forms of lexical items. Clusters of similar forms have been added to the small scale maps and the final design achieved using graphic design soft-ware. All maps were grouped into chapters by the main spatial message conveyed: extent of Litvish from the Baltic to the Black Sea (for example, the fragment of a map shown in Fig. 3), linguistic regions within Litvish, southward transition (Fig. 4), proliferation of local forms (Fig. 5) etc.

Fig. 3. Spatial pattern of “potato” (fragment; full image accessible at

http://www.dovidkatz.net/WebAtlas/34_Potatoes.htm)

Fig. 2. Technological scheme of the Atlas

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122 G. Beconytė, D. Katz. Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish: importance of maps in linguistic research

4. Samples of spatial patterns on maps

4.1. “Potato”

This map shows synchronic (areal / horizontal / mul-tilingual) patterning as well as diachronic (historical, retrospective, reconstructive) depth. First there is the coinciding of the two Litvish words with those of the co-territorial donor languages (not exactly, but enough to make it clear it’s not coincidence!): In the far west, where Lithuanian was the main coterritorial language, it’s búlvә; and where it begins to be Belarusian and related Slavic dialects it’s búlbә. One of the big surprises here is that far to the east, very deep in Slavic territory, the atlas came up with the historic antecedent: the high prob-ability that both búlbә and búlvә replaced the for Yid-dish much older érdepl [έrdεpḷ] (Germanic ‘earth-apple’, the word presumably brought by the first migrants from German speaking lands many centuries ago to the Grand Duchy territories). We unearthed this detail only be-cause we were lucky to find one or two informants who remembered from older family members a switch from the Germanic to the Slavic rooted lexical item. Note that the southerly appearance of kartόfl [kartᴐ́fḷ] is expected

in the porous border region between Litvish and South-eastern (Ukrainian) Yiddish, where kartόfl is frequent. The occurrences of kartόfl in Latvia are likely the result of relatively recent influence of the local German dialects that were prominent in Courland and its region.

4.2. “You are”

This was unknown to Yiddish dialectology. ‘You are [sin-gular familiar]’ was thought to be universally bist. After hearing binst from an elderly informant born in Svint-syán (Švenčionys, Lithuania), it was inserted in the ques-tionnaire and it was happily revealed by other inform-ants from other locations over many years (mostly in the 1990s), but it was only when the map was made, that it was revealed that the unknown binst (which apparently arose by analogy with first person [ix] bin), is character-istic for western Líte. Eastern Líte (or Raysn) goes with the standard Yiddish bist but the few survivals (if that’s what they are) of binst as far east as Mohilov and Roga-chov may be relics of an earlier Litvish when binst was much more common, and was perhaps pushed out by the force of an expanding territory of standard bist, but who can know...

Fig. 4. An unexpected cluster of an earlier Litvish form binst for “(you) are [singular familiar]”

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Geodesy and Cartography, 2011, 37(3): 119–124 123

4.3. Female relative by marriage

The revelation here was the ordering from a seemingly amorphous mass into a series of partially similar forms that give the whole picture a broad semblance of linguis-tic sense. To work backwards: The blue series (16–19) are essentially the non-Litvak / southern / Ukrainian Yid-dish / Southeastern Yiddish forms, so no big surprises there (though exciting for this atlas to document bona fide Litvish forms right near the Black Sea in the Litvish strip that extends way down south). Nos 13–15 are still a complete mystery. Where there is historically significant patterning discovered by the mapping of the data (com-pletely unrecognized by the interviewer over many years) within Litvish is a geo-historical differentiation between group I (nos. 1 to 4) which more or less represent the known, standard Yiddish forms, and the concentration of group II in Eastern Líte / Raysn (where an ancient He-brew vowel [u] is preserved, either as such in deep Litvish or in the i < u in those areas where it would be expect-ed, e.g. Chernobyl Yiddish, bordering with Ukrainian

Yiddish to the south, where the [i] forms deriving from historical [u] are universal).

4.4. “Garden of Eden”

The historically predicted forms have n at the end: ganéydn [ganéjdṇ] in standard Yiddish, as in English Gar-den of Eden, from the biblical place name Eden. To the best of our knowledge, a form with final -m (that could have arisen via analogy with other words ending in un-stressed -ǝm) had never before been documented. When we started to hear it “on the road” in Belarus and Lithua-nia we wondered whether a future map would elucidate patterning (as we have seen in our examples above). In the event, it did not show geographic patterning within the territory of Litvish as much as it showed an ahistoric form “all over the place”. Given that this “wrong” form would have been repudiated and corrected by the edu-cated, those who know Hebrew (and even other languag-es with cognates of Eden), and given the rise of Standard Yiddish over the past 150 years or so, it is a safe guess that the forms with final -m are truly Old Litvish, if not proto-Litvish, and by some miracle could be recovered in most parts of the territory at the turn of the 21st century, rescuing a disappearing Litvish form for posterity.

Because the standard form is so widespread in the language, orthography, culture, and so well known from the Bible, the occurrences of the standard form as well “all over” mean very little here. It is the discovery of the real pan-Litvish form for Garden of Eden that is illus-trated by this map (Fig. 6). It is emblematic of Yiddish more generally that a counter-classic form can survive and thrive even in a society where the classic texts re-main very much a part of daily life.

Fig. 6. A ‘real Litvish’ word (fragment; full image accessible at

http://www.dovidkatz.net/WebAtlas/16_Eden.htm)

Fig. 5. Variety of forms of “female relative by marriage”

and their distribution (fragment; full image accessible at

http://www.dovidkatz.net/WebAtlas/15_Female.htm)

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124 G. Beconytė, D. Katz. Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish: importance of maps in linguistic research

5. The Atlas

The evolving draft of Litvish: An Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish is accessible for preview at http://www.dovid-katz.net/WebAtlas/AtlasSamples.htm. The series of small scale linguistic maps represent characteristics of the dia-lect areas and are easily understandable to readers who specialize in the relevant language and culture but are not familiar with geospatial technologies. The structure of the linguistic database also allows for publishing the data as a web service accurately representing the location of occurrences of different forms of words on a larger scale map.

The Atlas project synthesizes culture-specific goals (the internal structure of the geolinguistics and cultural study of Lithuanian Yiddish) with more general issues, including possibilities for in situ mapping of language and culture after near-total destruction of the relevant population, based on the sporadic location of very aged “mohicans”. Unexpected continuities and discontinuities cc an elucidate select issues of multicultural patterning and multilingualism via comparison of the elucidated patterning with that of the coterritorial languages and cultures.

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vetnfarband. Minsk: Vaysrusishe visnshaft-adakemye.

Giedrė BECONYTĖ received her PhD in Geography and MSc in System Engineering from University of Vilnius. She is cur-rently employed as Associate Professor at the Centre for Car-tography, Vilnius University and is part-time system analyst in the state enterprise “GIS-Centras”. She has published 45 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings and a textbo-ok on DBMS. Her current research interests include thematic mapping, geographic information training, system design and project management.

Dovid KATZ (www.dovidkatz.net), a native of New York City,is an independent researcher based in Vilnius. He introduced and for eighteen years taught Yiddish Studies at Oxford (1978–1996), and after a stint at Yale, relocated to Lithuania to pursue Yiddish dialectology with the last Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors in the region. He cofounded the Vilnius Yiddish In-stitute (2001) and was professor of Yiddish at Vilnius Univer-sity from 1999 to 2010. He pioneered in-situ postwar Yiddish dialectological research in Eastern Europe. His works in Yiddish linguistics are available at: http:// www.dovidkatz.net/dovid/dovid_linguistics.htm.

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